The Coming Microsoft Cultural Revolution

Internet Explorer, Windows Server, Windows itself. Apart from BASIC, which they built independently, everything else has been ripping on someone else. DOS, their first big success, was actually a crappy clone of CP/M. Design decisions in that haunt Microsoft to this very day.

It's like the adage "good artists copy, great artists steal". Microsoft is firmly in the copy department.

In any case, this recent missive from Microsoft shows, at best, a tiny shift in strategy. They're still doomed to obscurity. They'll be around for decades to come, they might even be fairly profitable, but nobody will care about Microsoft. They'll use their products for lack of choice.

Few people today are choosing to use Microsoft and this couldn't be any clearer than their nearly complete failure in the tablet and phone market.

Until they reinvent themselves, divest themselves of all the baggage anchoring them to the past, they're stuck. IBM unloaded an awful lot to get to the place they are today. Imagine how crippled they'd be if they were still making PCs and printers.

Keeping Mao in power would be the major success, again very much from the perspective of the architect...

True believers have awful perceptions of what success means.

An example uppermost in Mao's mind must have been that, despite Lenin's putsch of 1917, by 1927 the USSR ran along lines that would have been instantly recognizable to a Tsarist-era bureaucrat from 1907. The structure of governance of the vast Russian empire re-asserted itself under the guise of Actually Existing Socialism, once the Vanguard Party had replaced the top and middle tiers of the Imperial nobility and bureaucracy with nominally-loyal functionaries. The same sorts of person are attracted to power whatever the ideology of the regime, and aside from joining a party and paying lip service to the party's ideology, they make the same set of assumptions about how power is to be exercised. True revolutionaries are discredited, expelled, or purged: see the fates of Trotsky and Zinoviev, for example.

Mao and his inner cadre saw the Chinese people, a generation after the revolution (itself largely pushed through by force of Russian arms, in the shape of the Manchurian campaign of 1945 that kicked the Japanese army off the Asian mainland), reverting to the social and political patterns of the Confucian bureaucracy that had run the empire they supplanted. True, the new bureaucrats paid lip service to communism as a guiding eschatology. But they weren't communists, much less revolutionaries. This was repugnant to Mao, so he fired up the whole social revolution that cost so many lives precisely to break that design pattern.

It sort of worked. In the short term, it caused chaos and starvation and massive deaths: but in the long term, it laid the foundations for a technocracy. Today's Chinese party politburo are primarily engineers and scientists who grew up during the cultural revolution, not the spiritual heirs to the earlier system. Although I think the direction they've taken China in probably has Mao spinning in his grave so fast they could hook him up to a dynamo and power their national grid ...